Hunter Biden’s ongoing rehab tour is about to take a hard right turn with an unconventional sit-down with Nick Fuentes. His conversation with the far-right influencer is set to premiere on web channel Channel 5 News later this month. The much-discussed interview — which nearly ended in a fistfight — appears to be part of the former First Son’s shift toward life as an edgy but serious media personality. Or is it more public relations on the part of Biden, who is rewriting his messy personal story to paint himself as a victim of the Republican smear machine?
Biden has been working with a Los Angeles-based anti-homelessness nonprofit, and starting an addiction care aftercare facility, since he was disbarred in Connecticut and Washington, D.C., last year following a 2024 conviction on federal gun possession and tax evasion charges. He also spent the past year building a second business as a visual artist.
He is now slowly returning to public visibility, but clearing his name does not appear to be his only motivation. Last week, he won $1.7 million in a defamation lawsuit against former Overstock CEO and 2020 election denier Patrick Byrne, who falsely claimed that Biden requested an $800 million bribe from Iran in 2021. He fights lies, but he also owns mistakes. This does not mean that his motives are not questioned.
“There’s tremendous freedom in having your own story,” Biden told Gavin Newsom last month on the governor’s radio show, after the two joked about each other’s presidential ambitions. He also defended his appearance on right-wing provocateur Candace Owens’ show, telling Newsom he hoped Owens could see the humanity in his situation. “I don’t think these are bad people,” he explained.
Biden is now a painter rather than a lawyer and a globe-trotting lobbyist, dividing his time between South Africa and the United States. However, you’re more likely to see him working on a growing podcast circuit – including Friends keep secrets, Chair expert and This is Gavin Newsom and Candaceamong them. But it was his August 2025 interview with Channel 5’s Andrew Callahan — where he spoke candidly about his addiction, the laptop scandal, and the 2020 election — that determined his next move: The two are said to be collaborating on a podcast, giving Biden a full-time platform to talk about recovery, politics, or whatever he likes.
A month ago, Biden and Callahan reached out to Mitchell Jackson, Callahan’s publicist Deputy “The genius scientist has turned into an enabler for mostly right-wing agitators — about having a powerful conversation that could ‘move the needle’ in American politics,” said a source familiar with the plans. Hollywood Reporter. That was the same day Jackson found himself on the phone with Fuentes.
Jackson said the far-right critic — who in 2022 arranged a Mar-a-Lago dinner with President Donald Trump and now leads a growing following of outspoken bigots — was looking for an interview to rehabilitate the image, hoping to explain how his views have evolved beyond the anti-Semitic material on which he built his brand. And who better to handle the publicity behind Owens, the queen of Internet controversy?
Jackson pitched both camps on doing the interview inside an unusual hotel — a wink at 2019 photos of Biden in new york post, He appeared topless and smoking a pipe in a hotel room. But no hotel in the Philadelphia area would allow them to film, so they built a proper set. Jackson said Biden signed the concept fully aware of what it referred to. His real motivation for sitting down with Fuentes, according to Jackson, was to get his point across: “The way he explained it was he wanted to talk to Nick because Nick is one of the most influential people with young people in America. And that’s true.”
Fuentes has an unusually loyal audience. Named after Pepe the Frog, Groypers has been a symbol embraced by the far right since approximately 2016. Fuentes has spent years stoking racism, anti-immigrant hostility, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, deploying this army with ease, often against Charlie Kirk’s “The Turning Point USA,” which Fuentes considered “America First” insufficient.
Jackson believes that Fuentes (28 years old) is now trying to put some distance between himself and his previous statements. He’s evolved, Jackson argues — he says he’s never advocated violence, never identified as a Nazi, and the “Boss” trolling of his teenage years isn’t what it is now, even if his “America First” policies haven’t moved an inch.
“I went and looked at some of the things he said recently on the show. I needed to watch him outside of the viral clips,” Jackson said. “It was very clear that he was criticizing his fans, if anyone would bother to watch, rather than just clips sent to them by people who hate him.”
The interview — deemed disreputable by a press corps who haven’t already watched it — is being shown for the first time this week. It remains to be seen whether this is the swing that launches Biden into the podcasting major leagues.
Until this latest series of appearances centered on moderation and a personal scandal, Biden had kept a low profile, communicating mostly through his recently launched Substack and avoiding cameras in the wake of his father’s controversial pardon while exiting the Oval Office (after promising he wouldn’t do so). Now Hunter is back, and he’s far more outspoken than anyone might expect from the scandal-plagued son of a former president.
In June, he joined (Not to mention that his 2021 memoir about addiction, Beautiful thingsbecame a bestseller once the Republican Party weaponized it). Since his return to public life, he has tended to confrontation — feuding with Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller (he later clarified that he meant to describe Miller as “sadistic, childish” and something cruder, not just “ugly”) and with CNN anchor Jake Tapper over his criticism of his stepmother Jill Biden’s memoirs — while remaining self-aware enough to make a fool of himself as well (“I’m not posing naked,” he said). Playboy Writer looking for a question and answer.
Jackson, for example, sees the strategy here: Biden is reaching across the aisle in a way that Democrats have not broadly done. “I think Republicans have been much better at finding common ground with people; Democrats have been much more resistant to doing that,” he said. “If the Democrats have a brain, they’ll watch the episode on Friday and send Andrew Callahan a thank you note. But I don’t know if the Democrats have a brain.”
However, there is a completely different reading of Biden’s media attack. In sting New York Post In last week’s column, Miranda Devine – author of Deep Dive into Data, Laptop from hell — argues that Biden’s press tour is actually a promotion for two things at once: an upcoming documentary and a new, more relevant answer to his infamous laptop question. The documentary, which has cameras rolling, follows Biden from 2021 until his 2024 pardon, and is produced by Kevin Morris, a Hollywood lawyer and longtime Biden donor who lent him millions of dollars during the same years the cameras were rolling and who purchased separate pieces of Biden’s artwork (as he explained when he was dragged into a closed-door meeting with House Republicans).
Devine writes that the film posits that “The Laptop from Hell,” with its evidence of the Biden family’s dealings in Ukraine, among other alleged scandals and all the hotel footage, was not a laptop at all, but a database stolen and manipulated by Rudy Giuliani, or perhaps Russian agents, or perhaps both, and then passed off as real with the help of Trump allies and a psychologist who once treated Biden.
The upcoming documentary, directed by S.R. Bendler, is based on the 1997 cult favorite and produced by Morris . hands on hard body, And soon, according to Bindler’s website. But last week, Biden spread the stolen laptop theory widely after previewing the claim recently Wired Interview to promote his upcoming book, with posts on X and his Substack.
“They called it the Laptop. I will call it that too, although the name is inaccurate, the source has never been identified, and no court or forensic examiner has ever certified the chain of custody that would make it evidence rather than a scene,” he wrote on
But what about crack? Hotel room timings? He says the stolen database contains real footage of himself, evidence of his years-long struggle with addiction that has become central to his new public persona.
“Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Letters sent at hours that wouldn’t belong to a sober person. Pictures I would never take in broad daylight.” “It’s the accumulation—the slow, daily work of the addict doing the thing that’s killing him because the alternative seems to die faster.”
